chavismo

A few weeks ago, Argentine journalist Martín Caparrós recalled at an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of Spanish newspaper El País that Venezuela, in 1964, was the first place in the world to abolish the death penalty. These were the times of Marshal Juan Crisóstomo Falcón, and the word “federation” had become the epitome of the supposed solution to all the nation’s ills in a young, devastated, and empty republic.

Although this was true on paper, in practice we had Antonio Guzmán Blanco, trained in the federalist ranks and who became the supreme leader of the Liberal Cause, decreeing in 1872 the execution by firing squad of his former ally, the caudillo Matías Salazar. In less than a decade, this declaration of principles had been easily overturned by one of its promoters.

The self-proclaimed revolutions continued to undermine national life until Cipriano Castro and his crony Juan Vicente Gómez defeated them all and proclaimed the restoration of liberal principles. “New men, new ideals, new procedures,” declared the man who moved the presidential office from the Yellow House to Miraflores Palace. But, having consolidated his regime and enjoying his days for vanity and festive revelry, in 1907, amidst delirium and a display of brute force, he ordered the execution of his great opponent, General Antonio Paredes, once the Army frustrated a supposed new revolution.

After sending him to the firing squad, Castro did not remain in power for long. At the end of 1908, Gómez toppled him with a palace coup, justifying the murder of Paredes as the reason his former crony was never allowed to enter Venezuela again.

The Gómez regime (1908-1935) was cruel. It tortured and imprisoned its opponents. However, he was careful to avoid such incidents. He defeated them in prisons and in the military fray to maintain his sepulchral order. It wasn’t until the next military dictatorship in the 1950s that news emerged of what we might call summary executions of members of the Acción Democrática resistance and union leaders. Thus, Leonardo Ruiz Pineda, Antonio Pinto Salinas, and Luis Hurtado remained in the collective memory when neighborhoods were named after them. The tortures inflicted by the fearsome Seguridad Nacional or the days spent in the Guasina concentration camp became literature or anecdotes in a historical thread woven by this type of political violence.

Perhaps the great Venezuelan tragedy has not only been the repetition of violence, but the inability to fully transform its tragedies into republican memory.

Later, the great unifying word was Democracy. Under this system, the country had achieved greater pluralism, freedoms, and social development. That said, excesses were committed during the counterinsurgency campaign, and thus, among others, the names of Alberto Lovera and Jorge Rodríguez Sr. remained, cases that were openly denounced in the media and for which some form of justice was sought.

In the 1980s, we witnessed the extrajudicial killings known as the “false positives” of the El Amparo Massacre and the repressive chaos of El Caracazo, a moment when the system should have been more deeply confronted with its errors and adopted more profound forms of reparation. Although political violence did not disappear with democracy, it had ceased to be accepted as a natural aspect of public life. The problem was that many of its wounds were poorly healed, if at all, and festered into resentment.

The return of horror

The 1999 Constitution was born with the idea of ​​refounding the Republic and making it “Bolivarian.” Initially, this meant defeating corruption, building a “participatory democracy,” and erasing all traces of what they began to call the “Fourth Republic.” This refounding ultimately meant reusing and multiplying the evils of the past and waging a systematic battle against democratic resistance.

The cruelty quickly became apparent: the impunity and flippant treatment of the April 11 murders; the shootings in Plaza Altamira in December of that same year; the political assassination of the controversial prosecutor Danilo Anderson and the subsequent witch hunt; the exponential increase in repression in 2014, 2017 and 2019, and the widespread fear following July 28, 2024. This cruelty is replete with numerous new stories of deaths under the indifference or custody of the State, from Franklin Brito to Fernando Albán, Raúl Baduel, Rodolfo González “El Aviador”,  the extrajudicial executions, and the cases we still don’t know about.

The ordeal Carmen Navas endured to learn about her son, Víctor Hugo Quero, and the cruelty with which his death was concealed have shaken Venezuelan society, which sees mothers as its embodiment of grief and national outrage, and which finds in women its greatest source of peaceful resistance.

As an old folk song, collected by Aquiles Nazoa and sung by Simón Díaz in his second volume of Tonadas (1976): “Little girl who embroiders the white cloth, little girl who weaves on your loom, embroider for me the map of Venezuela and a little handkerchief to cry with.” Perhaps the great Venezuelan tragedy has not only been the repetition of violence, but the inability to fully transform its tragedies into republican memory.

Every time pain becomes merely an anecdote or a slogan, the country remains haunted by the same monsters and ghosts. But, just as we have had this tradition of assassination and political cruelty, which today are multiplied in family tragedy and shared horror, on each occasion Venezuelans have been deeply moved by injustice, and this has led us to mobilize to transform darkness into brighter moments for our republic. May the future be not only bright, but much more lasting.

Alex Saab was once presented by the Venezuelan state as a symbol of national sovereignty. Today, the same state refers to him simply as “the Colombian citizen Alex Naim Saab Morán.”

That contradiction is not a side detail in the Saab saga. It is the story.

For years, chavismo invested extraordinary political and symbolic capital into transforming Saab from a relatively obscure businessman into something much larger: diplomat, political prisoner, sanctions-era patriot, and eventually minister of commerce. When he was detained in Cape Verde in 2020 on U.S. money laundering charges, the Maduro government reacted as though a senior state official had been kidnapped by a hostile empire. State media launched nonstop campaigns demanding his release. Venezuelan diplomats lobbied internationally on his behalf. Officials presented copies of his Venezuelan passport in foreign courts. Delcy Rodríguez herself described him as an innocent Venezuelan diplomat persecuted by Washington.

The regime did not merely defend Saab. It fused his fate with the idea of Venezuelan sovereignty itself.

And yet today, after reports that Saab was quietly detained inside Venezuela for months before being surrendered to the United States, the same state apparatus appears eager to emphasize something entirely different: his Colombian nationality.

The legal logic is obvious enough. Venezuelan law generally prohibits the extradition of Venezuelan nationals. Saab’s status as a naturalized citizen may have provided the government with the legal flexibility needed to facilitate his transfer while preserving a veneer of constitutional procedure.

But politically, the reversal is extraordinary.

Until recently, Saab was not treated as a foreign intermediary operating on behalf of Venezuela. He was treated as Venezuela. Attacks on Saab were framed as attacks on the republic itself. His return from Cape Verde during the Biden-era prisoner exchange was celebrated as a geopolitical victory. In January, Delcy Rodríguez publicly thanked him for his “dedication and commitment to the homeland” while announcing he would assume “new responsibilities.”

Only months later, he became deportable.

The Saab affair exposes how late chavismo governed through mutable political realities rather than stable institutional principles.

What changed was not merely the regime’s opinion of Saab. The operative meaning of Saab himself changed according to political necessity. He was successively businessman, envoy, diplomat, patriot, minister, revolutionary symbol, and now effectively a legally manageable Colombian citizen. The categories surrounding him  (citizenship, sovereignty, legality, loyalty) were treated less as fixed institutional realities than as flexible political instruments.

This is what gives the entire saga its distinctly Orwellian quality.

The issue is not simply propaganda. All political systems engage in propaganda. The issue is the degree to which political reality itself became fluid. Yesterday’s indispensable patriot becomes today’s silent liability. Yesterday’s sovereign diplomat becomes today’s extraditable foreign national. The contradiction is not resolved so much as administratively absorbed.

For Venezuelans, this dynamic has become painfully familiar. Years of institutional improvisation, overlapping authorities, constitutional contortions, and contradictory official narratives have gradually normalized incoherence as a governing method. People learn not to ask whether political narratives are internally consistent, but whether they remain operationally useful.

The Saab saga condenses that evolution into a single character arc.

And yet this is not merely a story about narrative manipulation. It is also a story about how chavismo itself changed under the pressure of sanctions, isolation, and survival.

During the years of maximum international pressure, Saab’s networks reportedly became central to the regime’s economic adaptation. Food imports, opaque oil transactions, offshore procurement systems, sanctions workarounds, and parallel financial structures increasingly blurred the distinction between state policy and survival improvisation. Saab occupied a hybrid role inside that world: part businessman, part diplomat, part financial operator, part sovereign representative.

That ambiguity was not accidental. It reflected the logic of a state learning to survive siege conditions.

But survival systems often produce figures who become simultaneously indispensable and dangerous. The very people who help preserve a regime during periods of extreme pressure can later become liabilities once strategic priorities shift. As Venezuela moved from total isolation toward tentative normalization, figures associated with the sanctions-era architecture increasingly carried diplomatic, financial, and political costs.

The fall of Tareck El Aissami and the PDVSA crypto scandal had already hinted at this transition. Entire internal networks once tied to the regime’s survival mechanisms suddenly became objects of public investigation and selective purge. Saab’s extradition pushes that logic much further. Unlike the internal anti-corruption campaigns of previous years, this was not simply the revolution disciplining itself. It was the state externally relinquishing one of its own.

And perhaps that is why the Saab affair feels so psychologically significant inside chavismo itself.

For years, the movement functioned through implicit assumptions about loyalty and protection. Certain figures appeared untouchable because they embodied too much of the system’s operational history and symbolic legitimacy. Saab seemed to belong to that category. His sudden transformation from protected patriot to expendable liability suggests that the category itself may be disappearing.

That does not necessarily mean the regime is collapsing. Authoritarian systems can survive long after ideological coherence erodes. But it does suggest a deeper transformation underway: the gradual evolution of chavismo from revolutionary movement into survival-oriented governing apparatus.

Revolutionary systems rely on myths that are supposed to remain stable over time. Survival systems prioritize flexibility instead.

The Saab affair reveals what happens when that flexibility extends not only to policy, but to reality itself.

Photograph by Maxwell Briceño for Reuters, 2024.

Human beings invented States to protect themselves from catastrophe. You understand this in Lewis Mumford’s books on the first cities or in Jared Diamond’s on civilizational collapse: we went from nomadic tribal groups to organized societies of thousands of people because we learned to organize governments that, besides making some richer and more powerful than others, reduced the chances of dying from hunger, cold, disease, or enemy attack.

Until the mid-20th century, Venezuela did not have a State that significantly reduced the primitive precarity of its population, that defended it from catastrophe. As in so many other places on Earth, it was then that Venezuelans began to benefit from technology and institutions that saved them from dying of starvation or influenza. There had been previous efforts, from Páez’s first economic reconstruction programs and Guzmán Blanco’s compulsory education to Gómez’s road construction.

But it was with the López Contreras administration in 1936 that we began to see institutions functioning on a truly national scale, vaccination and literacy campaigns, a systematic effort to transform a dispersed, sparsely populated society with a very low life expectancy, where the vast majority of people were sick and malnourished, into a functional and productive one. During those decades, the governments of López Contreras, Medina Angarita, the 1945-1948 junta, Gallegos, and Pérez Jiménez took advantage of oil revenues to implement measures that benefited the people. With democracy, in 1958, came more public works and institutional innovations, such as the expansion of political rights.

With Chávez, the decadent welfare state we had not only ceased to protect society from catastrophe, but became the cause of the catastrophe. It was like teaching a loyal guard dog to kill the children in the house.

Until that promise of development for all was broken, inequality began to grow, vulnerability began to regain ground, and a frustrated and confused society chose Hugo Chávez as its answer, precisely in the year, 1998, that marked five centuries since the first contact with Spain. It had taken us half a millennium to have a State that provided health, education, justice, and order. That year, that history of progress halted, and the long road traveled began to unravel.

Reversal and investment

As Paula Vásquez Lezama described it, since the Vargas tragedy in 1999, when chavismo appropriated the bodies of the survivors, everything the State gave demanded in return helping that State grow and maintain itself. As Mirtha Rivero recounts in La oscuridad no llegó sola, chavismo used every crisis to seize control of the entire State. Once it had it in its hands, it turned it upside down. The State that should have served society now only had to serve power, against society. 

With Chávez, the decadent welfare state we had not only ceased to protect society from catastrophe, but became the cause of the catastrophe. It was like teaching a loyal guard dog to kill the children in the house.

Chavismo deepened all the vices of those previous governments to reverse the complicated history of our development and invert the role of the State. The long-standing culture of police and military violence expanded to turn the entire country into a checkpoint, where the armed forces behave like an army of occupation that treats all natives as enemies, on a scale that covers the entire territory, not just the slums riddled with bullets during the Caracazo. The perennial culture of corruption among civil servants was perfected to privatize the public administration, which does nothing unless its staff is paid personally, and to transform the bureaucracy into an industry for extracting wealth from citizens and the land, far more voracious than under any dictatorial or democratic government prior to 1999.

As long as this perpetrator State exists, we will not have any transition to democracy in Venezuela.

The elephantine State erected by Chávez had lost much of its muscle mass by 2020, but it remained, and remains, capable of subjugating a nation diminished by the miniaturization of its economy and mass migration. Maduro redesigned repression to maximize the yield of his limited resources. And so he reached the point where he discovered, especially after the 2024 electoral fraud, the efficiency of kidnapping a minor, because that means imprisoning an entire family and the community network to which the family turns to.

The method of subjugating society by harming entire families is evident in the Víctor Quero case. It wasn’t administrative chaos that prevented his family from knowing whether he was alive or dead, nor was it that the clerks couldn’t find the file with his name on it. It was terror, a set of practices that a regime, illegitimate and rejected by the majority of the population, implemented to minimize the chances of losing power. That State, which for decades attempted to be a welfare state, providing public goods to millions of citizens, now focuses on managing harm to those millions in order to provide private goods to the few thousand who control it.

Beyond the anger we feel over the story of Carmen Navas asking about her son from the cruel giant who killed him, the Víctor Quero case is causing such a stir because of how it exposes the way the Venezuelan State has become the very opposite of what it should be. Instead of saving people from misfortune, it inflicts misfortune to govern through fear. Instead of being accountable, it lies and sows confusion for months as a form of torture. Instead of being the state of law and justice promised by the Constitution that frames it, it is a criminal State where justice does not exist.

The great work of chavismo

This is the State that killed Víctor Quero and that forced an elderly woman, for more than nine months, to undertake the economic and logistical challenge of visiting courts and prisons, even outside Caracas, driven by the hope of seeing her son again before he died.

And this State is the main achievement of chavismo.

Previous governments, whose main task was to govern for better or for worse, left behind a legacy of buildings and institutions, from banks and State-owned enterprises to schools, museums, and universities, which were a mix of successes and failures. Chavismo will leave some buildings and infrastructure projects, far too few considering the revenue it received during almost three decades in power. But the main creation of chavismo is this gigantic state that serves only to subjugate society.

And as long as this perpetrator State exists, we will not have any transition to democracy in Venezuela. We will not be able to return to the path of democracy and development from which chavismo diverted us.

A day after the chavista-controlled National Assembly gave the cold shoulder to Magaly Vásquez, and confirmed Larry Devoe as Attorney General, I spent the day going through the latter’s public record as a “Venezuela agent” in multilateral spaces.

It was a shocking way to spend a Friday afternoon. What was I expecting? Back in 2014, Devoe was handed the so-called Human Rights Council just as Venezuela was about to spiral into a multi-dimensional crisis. Súper Bigote seemingly set three tasks in the international arena:

Find excuses and someone to blame for the disaster that was about to unfold, by casting the chavista government as the victim.

No matter how bad the humanitarian situation can get and the extent to which social indicators were reversed, insist that Chávez lifted millions out of poverty forever. 

Every time other diplomats, foreign officials or humanitarian personnel showed details and data that showed a dire country, answering that Venezuela was sovereign and democratic and no one needed to meddle with our own mess.

Devoe was one of the three main bureaucrats that defined such diplomatic chavista wisdom in those days. These three had fancy degrees from European schools, and were clever enough to fabricate a good headline amidst pervasive criticism. Besides Devoe, there was a lady called Delcy Rodríguez, disgraced in the late-Chávez years but handed the Information Ministry soon after el comandante passed, with studies from London’s Birkbeck University and Paris Nanterre University. There was also Bernardo Álvarez, Maduro’s representative in the OAS who had been the man in Washington when Chavez’s beef with Bush reached peak levels.

Soon after they started to defend Maduro in Venezuela and abroad, the international perception about his regime suffered a deep setback. In July 2016, dozens of Venezuelan NGOs addressed Ban Ki-moon complaining about the behavior of UN agencies in reaction to the country’s humanitarian situation. The letter was based on a report that covered plummeting indicators in the previous four years (measuring institutional quality, human rights and the conditions of vulnerable groups). On August 10, the South Korean secretary general said Venezuela was undergoing a humanitarian emergency, quoting that very report.

In 2016, Devoe said an opposition-drafted amnesty law was a “serious threat” to human rights.

Rodríguez, Álvarez and Devoe had work to do. Footage of Delcy denying the humanitarian crisis in June 2016 (did so again in 2018 before the UNHCR) has circulated in recent days, but it was actually Álvarez who first established the regime’s position. In an IACHR human rights hearing that featured the likes of Alfredo Romero, Carlos Correa, Rafael Uzcategui, Liliana Ortega and other prominent human rights defenders—many of which the newly minted prosecutor will have to deal with— , Álvarez said: “It’s not a humanitarian crisis, that has a political intentionality.”

A 43-year-old UCAB lawyer, with human rights studies from the iconic Alcalá de Henares University, sat next to Álvarez and in front of Romero et al. He was Larry Devoe, and came with the goods in his turn to speak, praising the “23,146 health centers across the territory, a 333% in terms of infrastructure” that Maduro had inherited by 2015.

He made another remark that day that now sounds like a prescient spell. Back then, the opposition-led parliament approved an amnesty bill aimed at 82 political prisoners held in Venezuela. Devoe said its contents were a “serious threat” to human rights with the allegation that the bill pardoned international crimes like the use of minors to commit crimes, drug trafficking, terrorism and corruption.

Whataboutism at its best

Devoe would use that technique several times after. In October 2018, he was invited as a conference speaker in the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo to discuss OAS’ record in defending human rights in the region. His lecture’s talking points: Venezuela became “the theater of operations of OAS and US actions” and the OAS whitewashed the pre-Chávez regime. Before that, he showed up in a local TV program, El Matinal, where interviewer Pablo McKinney tried to make him feel at ease by introducing the brotherly ties between Dominicans and Venezuelans. Devoe started speaking of Venezuela’s all-round, positive transformation since 1999 in terms of human rights. When McKinney raised his eyebrows, Devoe claimed Venezuela had one of the best social security programs in the Americas, but the nation was under MECANISMOS DE AGRESIÓN since 2013.

Devoe kept going. Chavez had ended illiteracy and handed out two million homes, and so goes that famous song. Unconvinced by the explanation, McKinney said he couldn’t bear Venezuelans wandering the streets of his city. Es demasiado grave, to which Devoe replied that Maduro was getting the Allende treatment, and that Venezuelan migrants were returning home from Colombia and the DR because of the treatment they got in those countries.

Is this surprising?

Not really. That was the standard rhetoric wielded by chavista diplomats, or Cuban officials since the 1960s, which Devoe also liked to quote. That doesn’t exempt Devoe from being a cold liar that now heads one of Venezuela’s most important institutions. He’s still good for Delcy, as he was good for the three tasks that I listed several paragraphs ago. 

Devoe could not acknowledge the humanitarian crisis in public. It was too embarrassing. It would give credibility to widespread reports about malnutrition, tropical diseases and growing maternal mortality rates.

The videos show how Devoe reacts to well-documented accusations to “defend the country” and conceal responsibility. Take for instance this occasion in 2018, two years after Ban Ki Moon’s now-historic statement, where Devoe addressed Venezuelan experts in the Inter American Commission on Human Rights. He admits the scarcity of medical supplies, but attributes its cause to “sanctions and economic blockades” (sectoral sanctions then in place affected Venezuelan credit). When asked about Maduro’s public refusal to accept humanitarian assistance, Devoe said:

“Commissioner, Venezuela has the capacity to buy and provide the resources to guarantee the rights of its population.”

A kidney transplant patient, Francisco Valencia, interrupted Devoe to tell him he had not received medical treatment for six months. “I am dying.” Devoe replied: “Well Francisco, I ask you to leave this room and ask Euroclear to unfreeze the 1,650 million dollars that would let us buy your treatment.”

The problem with that statement is not only Devoe’s audacity in talking back to a helpless patient. Venezuelan humanitarian organizations were, at that point, getting resources because of international cooperation. That cooperation was, to an extent, greenlighted by the Venezuelan State. ECHO, Caritas International, the Red Cross, the International Rescue Committee and others were already in the country, liaising with local groups.

Like Maduro and Delcy, Devoe could not acknowledge it. It was too embarrassing. It would give credibility to reports that maternal mortality grew 90% between 2016 and 2017, of 11.4% of acute malnutrition among kids under 5 years old, and claims that the government was hiding data on spikes of tuberculosis, diphtheria and malaria.

Hard Left roots?

It recently emerged that Larry Devoe is the maternal grandson of Pompeyo Márquez, who had been a communist militant during Betancourt and Leoni’s war against Cuba-funded guerrillas. Márquez later joined the party system with Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS) through Caldera’s pacification process. He broke with Chávez when MAS endorsed his 1998 candidacy, and spent his final years opposing chavismo from within the Left.

On that shocking Friday afternoon, I also came upon a book about Venezuelan universities in the second half of the 20^th century. One chapter speaks about the political climate in Caracas’ Universidad Central in the 1970s. It mentions a Larry Devoe in the youth ranks of MAS, which clashed with the Leftwing Revolutionary Movement (MIR)—where Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, father of Jorge and Delcy, was a student leader—on campus and in student council elections. (At this point, everyone knows the fate of Jorge Rodríguez padre, murdered in the custody of DISIP in 1976 after the kidnapping of William Niehous).

Albeit rivals in the halls of UCV, it seems like the fathers of Larry Devoe and the Rodríguez siblings were part of the same political community 50 years ago. There’s a chance the new prosecutor general, born after the killing of Rodriguez padre, has known Delcy and Jorge for quite a while. Devoe Sr. was a MAS member along with Jorge Valero, a former Venezuelan ambassador to the UN and OAS this century, whom Devoe defended in his Santo Domingo speech.

Delcy, Ernesto Villegas and Larry Devoe presented a 2017 report denying the State’s responsibility for the great majority of deaths during that year’s protests.

Part of what people like Devoe and the Rodríguez siblings likely absorbed early on were accounts of the extrajudicial killings and torture Venezuelan communists endured in the 1960s. Then came the 1976 case of Rodríguez. And later, when Devoe was 11, the Caracazo—preceded by massacres like Cantaura and El Amparo, carried out by state officials, often with impunity.

These events are not just real; they must be remembered as part of the bloodier side of our recent history, one that did not begin in 1999. What is striking is that Devoe, now prosecutor in this “new political moment”, has repeatedly covered up similar crimes, the very kind the Rodríguez siblings have long grieved over.

In 2023, Devoe dismissed the ongoing investigation in the International Criminal Court as a political ploy, said Caracas proved crimes against humanity were never committed, and echoed Tarek William Saab’s claims that Venezuelan courts were doing their job in dealing with the bad apples. That now contradicts the discourse of the Rodríguez siblings, who got rid of Saab to appoint him. Six years before that, Delcy, Ernesto Villegas and Larry Devoe presented a report denying the State’s responsibility for the great majority of deaths during the 2017 protest cycle. This denialism has been a recurring pattern in his career as a Venezuelan State agent, and remains a part of chavismo’s rhetoric about “political violence since 1999.”

Someone told me that Devoe was respectful and decent in one-on-one interactions, even after heated debates over the causes and scale of the Venezuelan crisis. That perhaps he was caged by his own surroundings. Let’s see if Devoe can somehow turn that record around.

After all these years, we have reasonable doubts he’ll do so.